It’s not a position I can agree with, though. People play Football Manager for a lot of reasons, and I’ve been aggressively reminded in the past that those who desire a 'realistic' simulation actively enjoy the incredibly slow scouting and endless questions from the media. I still think the game has a serious problem with bloat. That’s not to say that all my problems with Football Manager have gone away. If last year’s Football Manager felt oddly retro, this year's is cutting-edge. The fact that striker-less tactics (something real world coaches have been dabbling with for years) have now finally found their way into the game’s preset formations shows a willingness to keep up with the times. The football on display this year is distinctly modern too, with a degree of fluidity and position swapping that feels authentic to today’s football world. I deliberately made this guy look weird, but honestly it wasn’t dificult. It’s balanced on a beautiful knife edge, and its greatest achievement is selling you the fantasy of sitting in the manager's chair. It's just easy enough that you can do it, but just hard enough that you’re never quite certain you can. It’s perfectly possible to arrive at a struggling club with a grand history, implement innovative new tactics, and take them back to the top. And as ever, Football Manager remains a fairytale generator. This year's edition, while flawed, has fixed just enough of my quibbles to draw me back in. An assortment of minor annoyances and disappointments with Football Manager 2015 left me too frustrated to continue.

By this time last year I thought I was done. I’ve won the World Cup, the Champions League, the Premiership, the Championship, League One, Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga, and most importantly, the Romanian Second Division.

I’ve taken twenty odd teams from rags to riches. Over the years I’ve played a dozen iterations of Football Manager and its predecessor, Championship Manager.

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